"No building is destroyed, and no pollution generated. The skin consists of an existing module: the wooden pallet."

AME-LOT is a proposal by French architect Stephane Malka to re-skin a student residence in Paris with shipping pallets. The modular facade is composed of hundreds of pallets strung together with hinges, which allows them to bend and articulate. This transforming facade allows the users to adjust the facade for light, ventilation or shade. Modern by design, the building’s skin is also organic through its use of materials.

Malka believes that ecology and sustainability is not about producing new materials, but in repurposing old ones. As he describes on his website, “The reappropriation of materials recycles the existing without additional processing, which would cost energy in terms of production and create byproduct pollution. The real environmental approach consists not in destruction, but in superimposing interventions upon our built heritage. It consists of a new land strategy, unreferenced on a parcel, constructed in a de facto “ecology” of means.”